Published 10:30 pm Sunday, October 26, 2025
By Frank Pool
I just finished reading a history that was, I guess, a 600-page-turner of a book.
Its title had come up repeatedly in my reading, and I knew its main thesis, which was also paralleled by a couple of other books I had read. So I ordered the book and found myself reading it a lot more quickly than I expected.
The book is “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” by Tom Holland. The author is a historian of the ancient Greek and Roman world, not a religious writer at all. In fact, he finds no reason to believe in God. Still, he has been drawn to the rich cultural tradition of Christianity and attends services at a 900-year-old church in London.
Holland has recently translated the Roman historian Suetonius. Looking at the bibliography of “Dominion,” you see that he has had a deep engagement with the ancient world and has followed his interest in the development of Christianity from ancient times until the very recent past.
His first chapter features Pompey the Great, and the last chapter highlights Angela Merkel of Germany opening borders to Muslim immigrants a decade ago. Instead of telling one consistent story, he presents the book through a series of snapshots hundreds of years apart. The stories are compelling, and he is a good writer.
It’s a book for the general educated reader, not for other historians. He tells memorable stories, and then spends time explaining their significance. Without the stories, the explanations would be abstract and tedious; with the stories, his commentary is linked to vivid details.
Holland used to admire the Greeks and Romans, but over the years he came to realize just how brutal and repressive their societies were. Infanticide and the brutalization of slaves, including sexual violence against boys and girls and men and women, was common.
Prostitution was so endemic that even slaves could purchase sex for the equivalent of half a loaf of bread. The Romans spent their afternoon at brutal gladiatorial games and enjoyed men and animals meeting violent deaths. They had no concept of universal love.
Christianity rejected this world order, which in Greek is “cosmos,” sometimes translated as “world.” The early Christians anticipated a second coming that would overthrow this world and institute the Kingdom of Heaven.
Holland writes about the early church in its struggles with Rome, about martyrdom and the resistance of Christians, about the church eventually dominating the late Roman Empire. The Rome that fell in the 5th century was a Christian empire. He used to believe that many of our values arose in Classical Antiquity, but he changed his mind on that.
His major thesis is that many of the ideas that secular Western society holds today, especially ones about human rights and the dignity of the individual and the respect for conscience and the concern for the poor and victimized, derive from Christianity.
Other writers have dealt with some of the same ideas. Through such books as “The Weirdest People In the World” and “The Invention of the Individual,” scholars such as Joe Henrich and Larry Seidentop have approached the thesis through sociological and historical analysis.
Holland’s book has drawn a great deal of praise and its share of criticism from philosophers and historians. His ability to write informative and entertaining prose allows him to reach a wide audience. In a time when even those who actually read books have forgotten the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rise of modern science and politics, it’s good to be reminded of half-forgotten names and ideas.
His critics accuse him of shallowness at times, but with such a sweeping picture to paint, it’s hard to fit in even important figures and movements.
Some fault him for focusing on Western Christianity, but that’s his subject. Besides, of all the other world religions, only Islam comes close to the worldwide reach of Christianity, and that religion is less geographically dispersed and plays little part in the development of Western values.
Except for a few memorable details, I have to say I didn’t really learn anything new, but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the book greatly. I was predisposed to agree with his thesis. Our contemporary values don’t just spring out of modernity, or even from the Enlightenment. Their seeds were planted and nourished by a Christian heritage, one that much of Western Europe is now busily divesting and discarding.
He might have spent more time on some of the dark sides of the story. He mentions the Inquisition and the willingness of Christians to kill each other over doctrinal differences.
People were burned at the stake over their opinions on the Trinity and the eucharist and baptism. Christians often try to live holy lives, but they sometimes try to make sure that others lead the same kinds of lives, and to violently enforce their will. Not everything Christianity brought about is equally admirable.
But that would be another book. I expected to be informed by “Dominion,” but the sheer pleasure of reading it came as a surprise.
— Frank T. Pool is an award-winning columnist who grew up on Maple Street in Longview and graduated from Longview High School. He is a semi-retired teacher living in Austin. Contact him at FrankT.Pool@gmail.com. His Substack is Paco Pond.
